McEs, A Hacker Life: June 2009

McEs, A Hacker Life

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Amsterdam on Thursday

On my looong way to Gran Canaria Desktop Summit later this week I'll have a six-hour afternoon stop in Amsterdam, perfect for grabbing lunch and a walk around town. Anyone interested drop me a line.

Cheers,
behdad

Labels: amsterdam, guadec

¶ 7:08 PM 0 comments

Friday, June 19, 2009

"The Wall"

To the friend or friend-of-friend in Toronto who borrowed my "Pink Floyd The Wall" DVD please return it ASAP. It was gift, and I want to watch it again this weekend. Thanks.

¶ 1:15 PM 2 comments

Thursday, June 18, 2009

The Times They Are A-Changin'

"The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast,
The slow one now will later be fast,
As the present now will later be past,
The order is rapidly fading
And the first one now will later be last,
for The Times They Are A-Changin' "
--Bob Dylan, 1963

¶ 11:26 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

If you see Keith Packard, say hello

Tell him to give me commit access to fontconfig. He stopped responding to my multiple pings and other messages a while ago.

The last fontconfig release happened over a year ago. I've been hacking on fontconfig and reviewing and committing patches submitted by others since August, and my tree has accumulated 190 commits so far, and touches about 7000 lines of code.

My tree fixes more than half of the bugs open in upstream bugzilla. It also includes many many performance improvements. Consumes less memory. Has a FcFontSort() call four times faster. And adds many new features as well as support for many new languages.

It also adds features needed for automatic font installation using PackageKit. This feature is included in Fedora 11, which means my tree is shipped in F11. Other distros however are waiting for a tarball without "behdad" in the version tag before updating.

Thanks,
behdad

Labels: fontconfig

¶ 5:08 PM 10 comments

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Love GNOME? Show Your Support!

The new Friends of GNOME program that was launched in January have been a great success. I for one have certainly been feeling the love. Stormy will be posting stats this week.

In the mean time, if you use and enjoy GNOME, here's a few different ways you can support it:

If you have not already, opt in the Adopt a Hacker monthly subscription. It's the easiest way to contribute to GNOME in a sustained and affordable way. Like they say, what are you waiting for? :)

If you prefer one-time donations, you can do that too. Remember, GNOME is a registered non-profit and donations are tax-deductible in the US.

You can also support GNOME by letting your friends know about it. Just go to this page and post one of the badges to your blog or website. Thanks in advance!

Finally, as a special offer, the first person to donate to GNOME in the Philanthropist level ($1200 or more) will receive the following framed art work with an engraved plaque recognizing your contribution:

(Click to enlarge)
The frame is 13"x18" and comes with over 4GB of ram! Perfect for a GNOME-Friendly office. If you attend GUADEC this year, it will be handed to you by the GNOME Foundation board of directors there. If not, we'll make other arrangements. Contact me at behdad-gnome-org to claim. First come first serve!

Labels: gnome, GNOME foot logo

¶ 10:00 AM 14 comments

Monday, June 01, 2009

"Your Point of View"

If you travel frequently, chances are you've seen many of the HSBC "Your Point of View" airport ads already. Everytime I'm boarding an aircraft or getting out of mine I enjoy them and want to blog about them, but by the time I have internet access I've already forgotten.

So I was delighted to finally look them up and find them here. They are truly brilliant. Here's a couple favorites of mine:

Labels: ad, hsbc

¶ 6:20 PM 2 comments

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